


Naming the Stars

by eponymous_rose



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 20:23:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14004033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponymous_rose/pseuds/eponymous_rose
Summary: Nott has been Nott-the-Brave since she can remember. It’s about time her new friends got some respectable titles of their own.





	Naming the Stars

They’ve had a lot of time to talk since they got locked up, her and the weird scruffy human.

Well, mostly he sits quietly in a corner of their cell while she tries to get the shivers out by picking at the wall and the bars and the little spaces between her teeth until she hasn’t got much left in the way of claws. Then they talk, or she talks and he listens, or she invents obscene insults to whisper to the guards just under the threshold of their useless human hearing while Caleb turns all kinds of entertaining colors out of sheer panic that they’ll hear her.

This time, though, he starts the conversation, his voice warm and soft and tired, without the undercurrent of frustration or anger or fear that always makes her want to insult the guards just a little bit louder. He says, carefully, “I’ve been wondering, and forgive me if this is overstepping, but you’re not just Nott, you’re Nott-the-Brave. Is that a title you were given? Did you earn it in some way?”

She shrugs. She’s got a good bitten-off piece of claw she’s been saving up to push between her teeth with her tongue, and she swiped a button off a guard’s uniform last week that she’s flipping over her knuckles, so her skin’s not crawling as much as it could be. Still, she really needs a drink. “It’s just my name.”

Caleb’s face scrunches up into the expression that means he’s trying to figure out if the misunderstanding’s on his end or hers. She’s getting annoyed at seeing that face so much, lately; two weeks in the same jail cell means she’s learned that he chews his food with his mouth closed, that his breathing’s so quiet when he sleeps that she has to kick him occasionally to make sure he’s still alive, and that he’s patient and kind even when she’s angry and loud, which are all equally annoying traits.

He scratches at the weird hair on his chin and stops scrunching his face, which makes his stupid human expression really hard to read. Too-small teeth, too-small eyes, too many fingers. “Sore subject?”

“No,” she says, and, deflating at the tension in his voice, adds, “Sorry.” She fumbles the button, drops it on the floor of the cell, snatches it back up. “Sorry. It’s complicated. The name doesn’t really mean what it says. Not all the way.”

“Is it--” He pauses, delicately. “Is it ironic?”

She sniffs and tries to look sternly down her nose at him; even when he’s sitting on the ground, it’s a difficult prospect that involves a little bit of wobbling on her tiptoes. “No. Probably not. Not usually. It’s like--” She tugs the ends of her hair and rocks on the balls of her feet. “It’s true, is what it is. It’s the truth about you that’s not messing around.”

“Oh,” he says, and it takes her a while to nail down the tone in his voice, because she sure as hells hasn’t heard it come from a human before: respect. He adds, gravely, “Then it seems a very fitting title.”

He doesn’t understand, she reminds herself. Not really. Doesn’t get that Nott-the-Brave is why she lurks in shadows and takes things when nobody’s looking. Doesn’t get that Nott-the-Brave means she’s unpredictable and untrustworthy.

After all, bravery’s nothing more than being scared but doing terrible things anyway, and she just can’t seem to stop doing terrible things.

Caleb says, “I wonder what my title is.”

“If you don’t know, you haven’t got one,” she says, and flinches when he smiles his stupid sad human smile. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

He waves a hand dismissively. “It’s fine. Goodness knows I’m no master of social graces.” But she thinks, staring at him sidelong, that he maybe looks a bit hurt all the same.

She scratches at her arm, watching him settle back into the corner of his cell, then blurts out, “It’s not so bad, being Nameless. Then you’re just you. And even if you’re nobody, that’s not such a bad thing to be.”

She hates not being able to read his face—even elves at least have twitchy ears to give them away!—because now there’s a pain in his voice that she doesn’t know how to place. “Perhaps not,” he says. “But should you happen upon an adequate name for me at some point in the future, please let me know.”

“Sure, Caleb.” She goes back to flipping the button across her knuckles, over-under-over, watches the light gleam off of it, and this time her hands are steady.

* * *

Of all the weirdos they meet that day at the Nestled Nook, Jester’s the one Nott figures out first.

She’s not Nameless, that much is clear. Her magic’s weird and loud in all the ways that Caleb’s is weird and quiet, and her Truth comes out just as strong, if a little... crowded. She’s almost Jester-the-Brave, Nott thinks, but she honestly wouldn’t wish that on anyone and dismisses the idea out-of-hand (maybe personal preference isn’t proper goblin naming convention, but she’s never exactly been a proper goblin). Jester-the-Strong is a contender for a long time, but it’s such an overlooked Truth compared to so many of the others she carries with her. Jester-the-Loud isn’t quite right, either, because the center of her, the Truth of her, is very, very quiet, like it’s worried what’ll happen if someone hears.

But she’s Nott’s friend, Nott’s second-ever friend, and she deserves a real name, so Nott tells herself it’s especially important to stick close to her in the name of research.

Today, research involves being trapped at the bottom of a pit while everyone else blunders around trying to find a way down to them. 

“Sorry,” Nott says, and yelps when Jester tightens the bandage around her leg. “Sorry!”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing,” Jester says. Nott barely manages to bite off the apology for her apologies before it leaves her lips. “It’s not your fault you fell! We were scared you were really hurt when you yelled like that.”

“And you jumped in after me,” Nott says, slowly remembering. Everything’s still a little hazy; she’d hit her head somewhere in the fall, and she’s pretty sure that one particular leg bone’s supposed to be all on the inside, not partway in and partway out. “Why?”

Jester’s absently humming a cheerful tune, which is a little unnerving given how much blood there is on her hands. “Why what?”

“Why jump down to get me?”

“Well, it’s because I’m your friend, Nott! And I guess it’s because I’m also—” And she drops her voice into her Beau impression, which sounds exactly like her regular voice pitched slightly lower. “— _T_ _he Cleric_ , and it is my job or something now.” She leans forward and whispers, “Also, I may have fallen just a little bit as well and kind of went with it as a dashing heroic move.”

“Dashing heroic move,” Nott echoes, faintly.

“Anyway, I bet basically all of the big amazing heroic stories are probably just someone tripping and falling in a pit and then probably just making up a more impressive story later. Probably.”

Nott lets that percolate through her possibly cracked skull for a bit. “Seems legit.” The jagged bits of her brain finally snag on the memory of her highly scientific mission, and she adds, in an appropriately investigative tone, “So you like telling stories, then?”

Jester clasps her hands together, and again, the blood’s a little alarming. “Oh, I love telling stories! Hearing them is almost as good. Especially when the Traveler’s the one telling them. He’s very good at the twist endings, and I love not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

Nott thinks, briefly, about a quietly concerned conversation she’d overheard between Beau and Fjord the night before, full of do-you-think-he-even-exists and well-what’s-the-harms. Staring up at Jester’s beaming face, Nott doesn’t especially want to bring up the topic.

“Hey!” Yasha calls from above. “We’re coming down. Got enough rope strung together here. Be there soon.”

“Cool!” Jester hollers back. “I’m excited to not die in a pit!”

A companionable silence falls while they wait. In the interest of scientific enquiry, and not at all because her leg’s really starting to hurt and she’s getting very dizzy again, Nott says, “Could you tell me a story?”

Jester giggles delightedly. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

Nott squints at her. “You didn’t fall at all, did you?”

“Maybe. Maybe I did and I’m saying this to cover it up,” says Jester, and beams. “That’s why it’s such a good story. You don’t know how it’s going to end.”

Nott hasn’t thought about concepts like ‘inevitability’ and ‘fate’ and ‘prescriptivism’ since the time she got a little too drunk and stole a dictionary with shiny gold trim, but she suspects the main reason she hasn’t managed to settle on a name yet is because Jester wouldn’t approve of anything that told her how she was going to be.

In that light, Jester-the-Storyteller seems like the best possible compromise.

* * *

After Jester, it becomes easier. Nott often pictures herself browsing through a thoroughly sparkly and well-organized and entirely unsupervised shop where the shelves are stocked with potential Names and Truths, all ripe for the taking. Jester-the-Storyteller is firmly in her pocket, the itch at the back of her head is Caleb’s Nameless state, but everyone else is just sort of up there for consideration.

In this mental picture, most of Beauregard’s potential Names are way up on a high shelf, annoyingly difficult to reach.

They’re taking the first watch together thanks to a bit of a misunderstanding where Nott saw that Caleb’s hand had gone up to volunteer, and so she’d raised hers, and then they’d seen that Beauregard had hers up because Yasha also had hers up, and there’d been some incredibly awkward and incomprehensible semi-polite oh-I-insists that made Mollymauk groan and drag his bedroll a little further from the fire. End result: Beauregard and Nott marching a perimeter to scout for and stand fast against the forces of evil likely encroaching on the camp. (Actual end result: extremely awkward walk in the dark with a terrifying monk.)

“So,” Beau says, several minutes in, a grin in her voice, “birthdays, huh?”

“They sure do exist.” Nott has given up on trying to figure out where Beau’s conversational lead-ins come from, which is honestly kind of nice. Takes some of the having-a-conversation-with-Beau anxiety off the table.

“I can’t believe you didn’t have one.” Beau grabs a tree branch and yanks on it a little, like she’s testing its springiness. Apparently satisfied with its level of twang, she lets it go and moves on. Nott figures it’s probably some cool monk shit or something. “I mean, that’s probably just me projecting my own cultural norms on you or whatever, and if that’s a dick move I’m sorry, but it’s just such a fundamental thing where I’m from.”

“I guess I just never really thought about it. We don’t get a lot of them, you know.”

Beau winces, visibly. Nott’s always found Caleb’s expressions easier to read in the dark as well, and it took her a while to figure out that it’s probably because humans are so used to not being able to see shit at night, and they just think they’re more hidden than they are. Reminds her of Frumpkin ducking his head under Caleb’s jacket and thinking he’s invisible. Even Beau’s goggles don’t seem to remind her that she’s not obscured from everyone’s view.

“Shit,” Beau says, in a bored tone of voice clearly meant to conceal her totally obvious sidelong pitying glances toward Nott. “Hadn’t really thought about that, I guess. I mean, it’s not like we get a guarantee, either. Especially in our line of work.”

They both go quiet for a bit, and just as the awkwardness of the moment starts to build too much, Beau says, “Glad you’re with us, though.”

“Me too,” says Nott, and marvels silently for a moment at how easy it is to say that and know the truth of it, now. “You’re all very capable. I think Caleb and I probably would’ve died if we’d been pulled into all this alone.”

“Yeah, but you probably wouldn’t have been pulled into all this if you were alone.”

Nott thinks about that. “I guess. We’d be in pretty good shape, actually, avoiding all the fire and death. Wait, weren’t you just saying how glad you are we’re with you?”

“Yeah, I was just arguing for the sake of arguing.” Beau grabs another twig as they pass by; this one snaps off, and she looks at it with disappointment before moving on.

“You do argue a lot.”

“Passes the time.”

Another few minutes of trudging silently in a spiral moving outward from the campsite; from past experience, Nott figures they’ll start spiraling back in after an hour or so has passed, then repeat the pattern.

When the silence has built enough that the palms of Nott’s hands are starting to get itchy, Beau says, “Anyway, I don’t know what the big deal is about living a long time. Most people are miserable their whole lives. No sense prolonging that, I guess.”

“I guess,” Nott echoes. “There’s good stuff too, though.”

A flash of a crooked grin in the darkness. “Shiny stuff? Sticks?”

“Sure.”

Another pause. “Nott, are you sad you don’t get to experience that for as long as some people do?”

Nott doesn’t mind the question, personally, but she’s kind of amazed at how well she can hear the space where Fjord’s admonishment would fit after that sentence. “Maybe. I get more than most, though. I think maybe we all do. Together.”

Beau raises a sceptical eyebrow. “You think?”

“Well, I mean, this is--” Nott swallows the word ‘nice’. “--not entirely awkward.”

“That’s fair.” Beau’s voice shifts again toward something tough and nonchalant, and Nott realizes belatedly that she probably borrowed it from someone, practiced it a lot until she got it just right. “No arrows flying or fire burning. Just the quiet. Doing a job.”

“Doing a job,” Nott echoes. “Real good job-doers, that’s us.”

“Yeah we are,” Beau says, and bends down. “High-five!”

“Oh.” Nott does the thing. “Yup, that’s a thing we do a lot, us taking-the-watch friends.”

“Sorry, yeah, that taking-the-watch bit was awkward. It was one of those weird ‘I know you don’t want to but I don’t want to if you don’t want to and now we’re both not wanting to’ things... you know?”

“I don’t really get most non-goblin modes of social interaction,” Nott says, apologetically.

“Okay, sure, yeah, that’s me projecting my own cultural norms on you again, my bad.”

The silence that falls isn’t exactly companionable, but it is... a silence. Beau’s brow is furrowed in thought, and in that moment Nott thinks she’s finally found the right Name for Beau, one that fits the anger and courage and awkward warmth underneath the bristling uncertainty. It’s not an insult, and it’s certainly not a name that would have a lot of meaning to a goblin clan, but she’ll keep it quiet for a while. Think about it.

It feels right, though. Beau-the-Young.

* * *

Mollymauk is confusing mainly because he keeps trying to Name himself, which definitely isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Mollymauk-the-Devilish, snarls his voice in battle. Mollymauk-the-Bold, crow his tattoos. Mollymauk-the-Seer, whisper his hands as he shuffles a deck of cards. Mollymauk-the-Kind. Mollymauk-the-Hunted. Mollymauk-the-Liar.

They’re Names, but they’re not Truths, and it’s getting harder and harder to drown them out. Nott’s never been especially good at sussing out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth (unless it involves teaming up with Jester, in which case she’s actually pretty good at solving crime and may have missed her calling in life), but she knows from plenty of experience when someone’s wearing a mask that doesn’t quite fit right.

“Why the porcelain?” Molly asks, one night at a tavern.

Nott blinks slowly—she’s had more than a few swigs from her flask on top of the round of ales they’d been offered for their latest triumph—and looks around, taking in a much quieter scene than she’d seen last time she’d been paying attention. Most of the others have probably headed up to bed already, although she can see Yasha’s prominent height over at a somewhat livelier table that seems about to break into either an arm-wrestling match or a full-on brawl.

Molly, beside her, is smiling broadly. “Far be it for me to judge if it’s simply aesthetic preference, but I feel like you’re capable enough to create a much more cunning disguise with the truly absurd amount of coin we’ve got.”

Nott’s thoughts grind on that sentence for a while before she manages to decipher it. “I like the mask. It’s mine.”

“Ah,” says Molly, and raises his glass in salute. “Shiny.”

She mirrors his gesture, spilling half her tankard in the process, and briefly considers licking the table so it doesn’t go to waste. Molly wouldn’t judge, she’s pretty sure. “I mean, yeah, but that’s not it. It’s mine. I chose it.”

Molly does a complicated thing where he snaps his fingers and taps his fists together on the table so it sounds like a drumroll. “A wise way to go about it. Not everyone has the wherewithal to wear a mask of their choice.” He snorts, says, “Wear-withal,” then looks at his own tankard with a suspicious squint. “May have had more to drink than I thought if I’m punning.”

“I mean,” Nott says, “you make your own mask, too. You have a lot of them.”

Grinning, Molly leans back in his chair, gesturing to the elaborate peacock tattoo on the side of his face. “I didn’t do this myself. It was chosen for me by a friend who took me on as a street-sweeper when I was a child. Wonderful artist, appalling manager.”

“Not the tattoo,” Nott says. “I mean, sure, I guess. It’s a mask, but so’s the story you just told.”

Molly blinks.

“You’re not a great liar,” Nott says, and the looseness of her tongue is only distantly alarming. “Sorry. It’s true. Only you say it so fast nobody really bothers calling you out on it. We know you’re good because you do good things. You don’t need to keep trying to convince us.”

For a while, Molly sits in silence, quieter in a physical sense than Nott’s ever seen him. Then he downs the rest of his tankard with a swig, and by the time he finishes, his grin’s firmly back in place. “What in all the world makes you think you’re the ones I’m trying to convince?”

He gets up a moment later and leaves the table, and Nott refastens her mask and waits alone for the buzz to fade and the Itch to take its place.

Mollymauk-the-Empty, she thinks, Names himself to drown out the echoes.

* * *

It’s not that she actively decides to follow Fjord, because that would be weird and a little creepy, but sometimes when she’s trying to keep her hands busy it means her feet think for themselves, and today they’re intent on trailing after him. She likes him, and she figures if she slips up and he notices her he’s less likely to yell than some of the others.

It’s been a while since they had some downtime, but now she’s got six shiny buttons in her pocket and the bitterness of really expensive booze at the back of her throat, and there’s only so many hours she’s willing to sit still for magic lessons from Caleb. When Fjord headed out the door of the tavern alone, it was only natural to trail after him and keep an eye out.

Anyway, he doesn’t seem to be doing much of interest. Half an hour spent wandering down side streets, occasionally posting up against the wall of an alley and just watching people go by. Nott gets impatient, fidgety, and ups her button count to eight, nearly losing sight of Fjord altogether when the man she targets bumps into her and almost accidentally pulls her mask off.

When she catches up to Fjord, it’s just in time to see him change.

She’s seen him do this trick before, and she’s always shocked at how it’s not just the voice and the clothing that shifts, it’s his whole demeanor, the way he stands, the confidence he does or doesn’t exude. Where Fjord was standing—strong stance, movements careful and deliberate, quick to smile—there’s now a hunched, weaselly-looking human with messy little tufts of gray-brown hair and filthy clothing. He’s got both hands out in front of him and keeps clasping them like he’s trying to wring all the water out of them, and his gaze is fixed on the ground with the grimace of someone wrestling with a lot of thoughts at once, all of them unpleasant.

Nott definitely watched him transform, she was right there, and she still catches herself glancing over this human’s shoulder, looking for the real Fjord.

“Pardon me,” says not-Fjord to a passerby, who shrinks back in alarm at the raspy, hesitant voice. “I seem to have lost my way. Can you direct me to the nearest inn?”

“Uh,” says the passerby, and points.

“Cheers, friend,” says not-Fjord, and Nott has to hurry to keep up with his surprisingly quick, shambling gait.

Down two streets, three turns around an uninteresting-looking building, and then Fjord ducks into an alleyway and becomes himself again, easy as that.

Nott breaks away from him then, just because she’s starting to feel like she’s pressing her luck a bit at this point when it comes to following unseen, but as she makes her way back to their tavern (growing her button collection to a healthy total of nine in the process), she catches herself nursing a weird sense of unease.

It’s not like it’s a particularly strange thing for him to do. Their group’s relied on his disguises more than once, and she knows that this is his version of what Caleb does when he studies his books every night, or what Beau does when she goes off into the woods to work out. He’s good at disguises, but that kind of good comes with practice, and that kind of practice needs to be around people, which they don’t get to do too often these days. Makes sense that he’d seize the opportunity.

What’s bothering her most is the doubt, because he’s good, he’s _really_ good, and she knows he’s good enough to fool any of them. She thinks about his big smile, about his snickering laughter, about his hand on her shoulder, ready to steady her or keep her from running into bigger trouble. How long did it take him to practice that?

There are terrifying stories she remembers dimly from her terrifying childhood, tales of creatures that steal your face and your life and your Truth and your Name and make them something all their own. The stories, she knows, never really ended well, but sometimes the creatures could be slain if you could only spot the single crack in them where the real monster came through.

She likes Fjord, but from that moment on she Names him Fjord-the-Faceless as a reminder to look for the crack in every smile.

* * *

“Get down!” Yasha snarls, and shoves Nott hard enough to the side that she ricochets off the cave wall, feeling pain shoot up and down her arm and her hip. Caleb yelps a protest and Molly calls Yasha’s name in confusion, but before Nott can even think about getting back to her feet, there’s a blast of fire that roars so loudly that all Nott can do is curl into a ball with her hands crushing down her ears, pressing her face into the dirt.

The horrible sound stops quickly, but it’s been replaced with the horribly familiar smell of burning flesh, and Nott thinks that maybe this is it, that maybe this is where she dies, and waits for the pain to hit in earnest. Instead, Caleb’s hand rests gently on her shoulder, pulling her up from the ground. He’s saying things she can’t hear over the ringing in her ears, but the worry in his face is familiar enough that she’s apologizing and smiling reassurance before she’s quite sure what’s happened: a trap. A trap she’d sprung that probably would’ve killed her.

Beside her, Yasha is standing, but she’s hunched over and has one arm cradled to her chest. “I fucking hate this place,” she says, loudly enough to penetrate the ringing in Nott’s ears, and shoves past Jester’s reaching hand to storm back the way they’d come, out through the entrance of the cave.

Molly says, “Let her go,” and Caleb says, again, “Nott, are you hurt?” and Beau says, “Maybe she has the right idea, this place sucks,” and Jester says, “But her arm was all burned up and I can heal it,” and Fjord says, “She’ll be okay, just give her space,” and all of them suddenly seem so loud that Nott slips out of Caleb’s shaking grasp, dodges past several sets of legs, and weaves her way back outside the cavern.

It only takes her a moment to spot the trampled-down portions of underbrush that show exactly where Yasha went, and she’s quick enough on her feet that she manages to catch Yasha’s trail, no problem. (Okay, so the smell of burning meat also helps a lot.)

She catches up with Yasha to find her crouched in front of a rushing stream of water, rinsing out a nasty-looking burn that covers most of her right forearm. She glances up as Nott crashes not-so-stealthily out of the bushes, and whatever Nott was thinking of saying dies somewhere en route to her mouth and is replaced with, “Please don’t kill me.”

Yasha blinks at her, then hisses as she ladles water over the burn again with her good hand. “Why would I kill you?”

“Sorry. I don’t know. I guess that would be a bit counterproductive. That’s sort of my default thought when you’re around.” Vaguely aware that she’s babbling, Nott shuts her mouth, then opens it again and says, “You saved me.”

“Um.” Yasha gives that some thought. “Yeah. I did.”

Another scrambling for words. “Thank you.”

Yasha looks at her, pauses midway through scooping up another handful of water. “Okay,” she says, finally.

Nott bares her teeth in a nervous smile, remembers belatedly that tall people who aren’t Caleb often find that more distressing than friendly, and blurts out, “Why?”

Another long pause while Yasha mulls it over. “I knew I could take the hit. It’s what I do.”

“Oh,” says Nott. “I’ve got some bandages you could use if you need them,” she adds, and holds out her arms by way of demonstration.

“Thanks. I’m fine.”

Cautiously, Nott edges up next to Yasha, watches the blood from her wound drip and dissolve into the stream’s clear waters. “It must be nice to be able to stop other people from getting hurt.”

Yasha shakes the water off her arm, experimentally opens and closes her hand. “Sometimes. It’s worse to be the one left behind.”

Nott swallows another round of babbling, forces herself to think, Yasha-like, for a moment before responding. “Yeah. I guess it would be. Are you gonna leave now?”

Nearly a minute of quiet contemplation passes before Yasha says, “No.”

Nott forgets herself and grins again, but Yasha only smiles back, crooked and unsure, so Nott takes her by the uninjured hand and leads her back to the rest of the group, and with every step she feels the rightness of Yasha’s Truth slotting neatly into place.

Yasha-the-Survivor is a hard Name, but she thinks Yasha will wear it well.

* * *

“I just--” Caleb presses his fingers to his mouth and cocks his head to one side, watching her the way he does when he’s really concerned, then starts again. “I just want to make sure you understand how dangerous this could be.”

Nott feels chills up and down her spine. “I’ll be careful, Caleb. I always am.”

He winces at that, takes her by the shoulder and pulls her a little bit farther from the others, lowers his voice to a whisper. “You don’t have to do this if you are not comfortable with it.”

“You need to be a goblin to talk to goblins,” Nott says. “I can get us past. We don’t have any other options.”

He sighs once, heavily. “Be careful,” he says, with an air of resignation.

“I will.” She scratches at her cheek, weird and exposed-feeling without the bandages. “I know how to talk to them. They don’t know who I am or what I did. They’ll talk to me.”

“Nott-the-Brave.” His smile twists. “I can only wish I were as brave as you and not just—”

“—Nameless?” Now that she knows him better, Nott has no trouble spotting the way his face falls for a moment before he shores it up with another sad smile. “You’re not, though. It just took me a little longer to figure it out. You’re Caleb-the-Responsible.”

Amazing that she’d ever thought his face was unexpressive. Now she can actually watch his thought processes stumble one by one to a halt. “I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly reliable person in that way,” he says, after a long pause.

“No, not like that. Not really. You... take things on. Guilt, mostly, but just responsibility in general. You steal it and make it yours. That’s what you did for me, after all.” Alarmed at the sudden steeliness of his expression, she adds, “Anyway, what do I know about goblin names? I’m not a very good goblin.”

He sighs, heavily, like someone feeling a weight settling around his shoulders, and for all her backpedaling she knows a Naming when she sees it. “I think you’re far more perceptive than you give yourself credit for.”

“I’ll be okay, Caleb,” she says. “Promise.”

He pulls her into a quick hug, then holds her back at arm’s length, his brow furrowed in thought. “You know, I think you really will.”

She grins her biggest grin at him, the one that puts a startled smile on his own face, and then turns to the others: Jester-the-Storyteller, Beauregard-the-Young, Mollymauk-the-Empty, Fjord-the-Faceless, Yasha-the-Survivor.

Then she turns on her heel and begins marching toward the goblin encampment, feeling the weight of the buttons in her pockets and the singing of the Itch in the back of her head. Maybe being Brave, being scared and doing horrible things anyway, isn’t so bad when she’s doing it for them.

Her clan. Her family.


End file.
